Arte Moreno Agrees To Sell Angels To Rams Owner Stan Kroenke

Angels owner Arte Moreno has agreed to sell the team to billionaire Stan Kroenke, owner of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, reports Sam Farmer of the L.A. Times. It’s a stunning and out-of-the-blue development. Moreno explored a sale of the Angels a few years ago but wound up pulling the team off the market. As of Jan. 2023, Moreno said he was no longer pursuing a sale of the team he’d owned since 2003.

The pending sale values the Angels at $4 billion, reports Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic. (Bill Shaikin of the L.A. Times first reported that the Angels sold for a larger number than the record $3.9 billion for which Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones recently purchased the Padres.) Notably, Ghiroli adds that Kroenke is purchasing Moreno’s majority but not the entire franchise. There will still be other minority owners involved in the group. It’s not clear whether Kroenke will make an effort to buy them out.

The acquisition of the Angels adds to an immense portfolio of sports teams for Kroenke. In addition to being the principal owner of the Rams, the 79-year-old real estate mogul owns the majority stake in the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids, and the English Premier League’s Arsenal FC.

“The Angels Organization is pleased to announce this transaction with Kroenke Sports & Entertainment,” Moreno said in a press release announcing the sale, which he expects to formally close in the first quarter of 2027. “The Moreno Family has been honored to steward the Angels for 23 years and we believe with KSE’s experience and success they are the best next owner for the franchise. The Angels Organization looks forward to continuing its commitment to the fans, our employees, the players and our business partners.”

Today’s shocking sale brings to a close one of the most-maligned ownership tenures in recent MLB memory. Moreno purchased the Angels in 2003 for a reported $184MM, following the team’s World Series win in 2002. Though the Halos made several playoff runs in the subsequent few seasons, they’ve been among MLB’s most consistent losing clubs for more than a decade now. Anaheim hasn’t reached the playoffs since winning the AL West in 2014 and hasn’t had a winning record since an 85-win season in 2015. That prolonged stretch of futility comes despite the Angels rostering two of the greatest players of the current generation — if not the history of the entire sport — for six years: Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout.

Moreno has long been known as one of MLB’s most hands-on owners. He’s developed a reputation for having an outsized role in the team’s baseball operations and is prone to frequently turning over both his front office and dugout staff. Current Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto was the team’s general manager for that 2014 division crown, but Dipoto resigned the following July after clashing with then-skipper Mike Scioscia. Moreno backed Scioscia, who’d managed the club since 2000, prompting Dipoto to step down despite efforts from Moreno and team president John Carpino to convince him to stay.

Former GM Bill Stoneman stepped in as the Halos’ interim GM to close out that season. Billy Eppler was eventually hired as GM, fired five years later and replaced by Perry Minasian, whom Moreno fired earlier this summer and replaced with current interim GM John Mozeliak. It’s not yet clear whether Mozeliak will lead baseball ops moving forward, and the ownership change makes that even murkier.

The managerial turnover has been even more stark. After Scioscia stepped down as manager following the 2018 season, the Angels hired Brad Ausmus to replace him — only to give Ausmus the boot a year later when Joe Maddon became available. Maddon skippered the Halos until midway through the 2022 season, when he was fired in favor of Phil Nevin. Nevin managed the team for a season and a half before being replaced by Ron Washington, whose tenure as skipper was interrupted by a quadruple bypass procedure. Bench coach Ray Montgomery stepped up in his place to close out last season, but neither were brought back in 2026. Instead, Moreno hired former big league catcher Kurt Suzuki as a rookie skipper with no coaching experience and did so under the unusual premise of giving him only a one-year contract. Further change is widely expected this offseason, though nothing has been formally announced. Each of those managerial changes, naturally, was accompanied by significant turnover on the coaching staff.

Beyond the personnel turnover in the front office and dugout, Moreno is known for his fixation on acquiring big-name players and overriding his baseball operations staff to make it happen. He reportedly drove negotiations on Albert Pujols‘ 10-year contract and on Anthony Rendon‘s seven-year deal, among others. Moreno’s frustration over losing out on third baseman Adrian Beltre — to the division-rival Rangers, no less — were said to have prompted him to push then-GM Tony Reagins to pull off a deal for Blue Jays outfielder Vernon Wells, despite the fact that Toronto was actively trying to dump his contract. Scott Miller of CBS Sports wrote in 2013 that Moreno had threatened to fire Reagins if he didn’t complete the trade.

As the Angels spent lavishly on position players over the years, they simultaneously took a step back when it came to spending on pitching. In 2011, the Angels extended Jered Weaver for five years and $85MM before signing lefty C.J. Wilson to a five-year, $77.5MM deal. They gave Joe Blanton a two-year, $15MM contract in 2012. Their next multi-year deal for a starting pitcher — free agent or extension — didn’t come for more than a decade, when Tyler Anderson signed a three-year, $39MM contract at the outset of free agency. Weaver’s contract is still the largest the Angels have ever given to any pitcher. That dearth of commitment to pitchers spanned six general managers (including interims), making it hard to believe it could be anything other than a philosophical decision by Moreno himself.

At the 2023 trade deadline, when faced with the reality of Ohtani’s impending free agency, Moreno’s Angels made an ill-advised win-now push that saw the club deal from an already thin farm system to acquire Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Randal Grichuk, C.J. Cron and others. The team quickly collapsed, at which point Minasian put all of the players he’d acquired at the deadline — and much of the rest of the team, excepting Ohtani and Trout — on waivers in an effort to dump salary and duck under the luxury threshold. In the offseason, when Ohtani was a free agent and presented the concept of his overwhelmingly deferred contract to several interested parties, each of the Giants, Blue Jays and Dodgers were amenable to the setup. The Angels, according to then-L.A. Times scribe Jack Harris, would not agree to the terms.

Moreno said at the time that he had “zero regrets” about his win-now push in Ohtani’s final year with the club. Perhaps that’s true to this day, but the decision unequivocally set the franchise back years. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported earlier this summer that interest in Ohtani was so high at the ’23 deadline, the Rays were even willing to part with a young third baseman who at the time was one of their top prospects … Junior Caminero, whose 82 homers since Opening Day 2025 lead the American League and trail only Kyle Schwarber and Ohtani for the major league lead.

Ohtani, naturally, had drawn interest the prior offseason and prior trade deadline, when the Angels could’ve rightly set an even higher asking price — something akin to or even in excess of the Nationals’ mammoth Juan Soto haul (which included James Wood, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore and current top-100 prospect Jarlin Susana). Rosenthal noted that in each instance — despite the decade of losing baseball and bottom-of-the-league farm systems — Moreno was not willing to consider dealing his two-way superstar.

That line of thinking extended beyond Ohtani. Even amid all their losing seasons, the Angels rarely, if ever, sold off veteran players at peak value. That extends beyond Ohtani and Trout. Players like Luis Rengifo, Andrew Heaney and Patrick Sandoval (to name only a few) were held either until they were injured and cut loose or until downturns in performance eroded their value. Moving players like that over the years could very well have netted the type of complementary/supporting players the Halos lacked on a year-over-year basis, but they opted not to do so under multiple baseball operations regimes.

This summer’s trade of controllable players like José Soriano and Chase Silseth were met with shock not because fans and pundits couldn’t see the logic behind them but rather because they ran perpendicular to the team’s typical line of thinking. The Angels didn’t commit all the way. Lefty Reid Detmers and shortstop Zach Neto are still in Anaheim despite drawing strong interest. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the trades of Soriano and Silseth should have been taken as stronger indicators that much more impactful changes were on the horizon.

The urgency to build around Ohtani and Trout even seemed to trickle into the team’s draft strategy. For several years, the Halos focused on the most polished, MLB-ready college players in the draft, even if those players came with lesser ceilings. Nolan Schanuel, for instance, was rushed to the majors just six weeks after being drafted in 2023 as part of that push to win around Ohtani. The constant focus on MLB proximity and rushing of first-rounders too frequently left the Angels with talented but unready players learning in the majors, often at the expense of their broader development. It also kept the farm system thin on an annual basis, perennially ranking at or near the bottom of the league in rankings from outlets like Baseball America, MLB Pipeline, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, The Athletic and ESPN.

Zooming out even further, Moreno did his public perception no favors by rarely addressing the fans and media. He often left his GMs and managers to do the talking for him, which led to embarrassing situations such as the one where Minasian had to publicly dispute Yusei Kikuchi‘s comments that the air conditioning in the team weight room was broken. (The Angels posted a job listing for an HVAC specialist the next day.)

When Moreno did speak, he often made befuddling statements. His most recent public comments — prior to today’s sale agreement — are perhaps the most egregious of the bunch. Speaking prior to the 2026 season, Moreno was pressed about his team’s MLB-worst 11-year playoff drought and stretch of 10 losing seasons. He replied, incredibly, that winning baseball simply wasn’t a priority for his fan base.

“The number one thing fans want is affordability,” Moreno said this past February (via Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register). “They want affordability. They want safety, and they want a good experience when they come to the ballpark. Believe it or not, winning is not in their top five. The moms want to be able to afford to bring the kids. … They want to be able to bring their kids and be affordable and they want safety and they want to have a good experience, so they get all the entertainment stuff or whatever.”

Angels fans flocked to social media to offer a swift rebuke of those out-of-touch comments. Throughout the season, Angels fans have brought signs urging Moreno to step down and chanted for him to sell the team. While they surely hoped and dreamed for this sort of outcome, it’s doubtful many realistically thought this day would come so soon — and with virtually no foreshadowing.

Kroenke’s purchase of the Angels brings about a new era of hope for the Halo faithful. After 11 losing seasons and a dozen years away from October baseball, the franchise isn’t likely to be turned around in immediate fashion, but a new owner brings the promise of greater spending, a more hands-off approach and some continuity both in the front office and in the dugout that prior versions of the club have previously lacked. The Angels have often felt directionless and at the mercy of ownership’s whims. Kroenke, with a diverse professional sports portfolio, seems likelier to entrust day-to-day operations to the architects he puts in place — whether that’s Mozeliak or a fresh hire.

There are still plenty of questions yet to answer. It’s likely that Kroenke, a well-known buyer with a strong foothold in professional sports, will be approved as the new owner and control person without issue. Less clear is what’s on the horizon for both the front office and coaching staff, whether the team will dive headlong into the rebuilding waters after dipping its toe in the pool at this past deadline, and what future payrolls might look like under a more aggressive owner.

Time will bring answers to all, but for now, Halos fans are surely feeling more optimistic than they have at any point in recent memory — and with good reason, based on the context of the AL West. The Rangers, Astros and Mariners are all in the midst of disappointing seasons, to varying degrees. Texas has spent the past couple years scaling back payroll. The vaunted core that led Houston to prominence for nearly a decade is turning over. Seattle entered the year as division favorites but has stumbled to a sub-.500 record. The A’s are still in a transition phase as they wait on the construction of their new Las Vegas stadium. The Angels aren’t going to break out as AL West favorites anytime soon, but this is the weakest the division has looked since the last time the Halos were a force in the standings, and today’s sale could well mark an inflection point as they look to rise from the ashes. It’s a new era in Anaheim.